New in paperback: 'Behind the Beautiful Forevers,' 'The Corpse Exhibition,' 'Pandora's Lunchbox' and more

It’s fair to be wary of Katherine Boo’s "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" (Random House, 288 pp., $16). Boo, a writer for The New Yorker, offers a story that could be seen as a literary extension of the slum tourism in India that gained popularity after Danny Boyle’s film “Slumdog Millionaire” in 2008.

Centering on a Muslim boy accused of setting a neighbor on fire, Boo’s book delves into life in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum surrounded by five extravagant hotels that make squatter settlements look “like villages that had been airdropped into gaps between elegant modernities.”

Boo keeps herself out of the story except for an author’s note, despite the fact that she witnessed “most of the events described in the book.” Her methods are fair, but questions nag about what translators add to or take away from the full picture.

Still, Boo captures the way that, in a prospering India, “old ideas about accepting the life assigned by one’s caste or one’s divinities were yielding to a belief in earthly reinvention.” She also powerfully demonstrates the limits of such philosophies in the face of systemic corruption, where “it is blisteringly hard to be good.”

Reviews of five other noteworthy paperbacks:

The Corpse Exhibition

Hassan Blasim; translated by Jonathan Wright

(Penguin, 196 pp., $15)

For his American debut, Blasim, who fled Iraq in 2003 and now lives in Finland, brings together stories chosen from two collections previously published in the U.K.

Blasim offers 14 stories of Iraq that capture the surreal qualities of life during the country’s last war with the United States.

The title story, like Franz Kafka’s “A Report to the Academy” and “In the Penal Colony” and George Saunders’ “Exhortation,” brings together businesslike narration with horrific actions. The story’s narrator discusses the nefarious art of preparing corpses for public display to maximize the effect of a scene of carnage.

“The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” follows a man named Salim Abdul Husain who escapes from Iraq to the Netherlands and begins his new life by taking the name Carlos Fuentes.

In Iraq, Salim’s work for the city involves cleaning up after explosions have incinerated “chickens, fruits and vegetables, and some people.” After gaining asylum in the Netherlands, he makes progress in “burying his identity and his past,” but is unable to make a full escape

Reviewing the book for the Chicago Tribune, M. Lynx Qualey said that Blasim’s stories “present a vivid, sometimes lurid picture of wartime Iraq.”

Qualey observed, however, that the collection offers “much more than miniature portraits of the country,” as “Blasim is particularly interested in the slippery space between reality and story, and even the most realistic stories in his collection have an element of the surreal. The reader walks on solid ground one moment, and the next the ground gives way – sending him tumbling into deep, otherworldly holes.”

Qualey acknowledged that the collection is not comprised of “finely wrought stories, where each word feels as though it has been carefully glued into place,” and “occasionally, there are missteps, places where a story and ending feel mismatched.”

Still, Qualey explained, “These dark and sometimes bitterly funny stories are shape-shifting, Borgesian tales in which often we discover the narrator is mad or lying,” as “the reader is dragged along and left suddenly with a handful of ashes. Most of these stories feel ready to collapse or explode at any moment.”

While “there is plenty of horror in the 14 collected stories,” that sensation “is always tempered by an everyday surrealism,” Qualey concluded. “Although the stories are often grim, there is a desire to live.”

Pandora’s Lunchbox

Melanie Warner

(Scribner, 279 pp., $16)

Published the same year as Michael Moss’ “Salt Sugar Fat” and Wenonah Hauter’s “Foodopoly,” Warner’s book examines “How Processed Foods Took Over the American Meal.”

“Pandora’s Lunchbox” rose from Warner’s wondering about how the food she purchased at grocery stores – “frozen dinners, kids’ lunches, loaves of bread, processed cheese, hot dogs, pudding, and Pop-Tarts” – lasted so long without spoiling.

As she tested food expiration dates, she worried that her research would lead to “awful infestations of fruit flies or mealworms,” but, she explains, “none of this happened. Much of my collected food stubbornly refused to decay, even after as many as six years – far beyond expiration dates.”

Waters examines the way that “so much of the food we eat today” is not what it seems, as food production has become “tremendously technical.” Also, “the curious, intricate world of food science and technology” means that food – “some 70 percent of our calories” – isn’t “so much cooked as disassembled and reassembled,” manipulated “beyond recognition” by “preservatives you can’t taste, smell, or see.”

In The New York Times, Mark Bittman noted that Warner’s book stood out even during a year when it seemed that every food-related book being published offered some “variations on the title ‘How Big Food Is Trying to Kill You.’ ”

For Bittmann, “Pandora’s Lunchbox” is “so much fun that you might forget how depressing it all is. This is in part thanks to Warner’s measured, almost dry but deceptively alluring reportorial style, but it’s also because the extent to which food is manipulated – and therefore, consumers as well – is downright absurd. There are more Holy Cow! moments here than even someone who thinks he or she knows what’s going on in food production could predict.”

Set in Indiana, Kimberling’s comedic debut follows amateur ornithologist Nathan Lochmueller and his relationship with Lola, a woman whose “charm lay not in her husky voice or delicate face or fluid figure, but in the way all these things reflected her intense and genuine pleasure in seeing you.”

Reviewing the novel for NPR, Petra Mayer acknowledged that when she cracked the book open, she “braced for a thorough beat-down with the dreaded Whimsy Hammer.”

“But,” she explained, “then the book . . . unfolded, like a flower bud in hot tea,” as “the people you meet in ‘Snapper’ all defy expectations in their own ways, for good or ill.”

Mayer acknowledged that “Kimberling's language can occasionally veer off into faux-folksy territory,” but, she explained, “those missteps are rare, and for the most part Kimberling makes you feel as if you too were sitting under a railroad trestle on a summer's day drinking beer with Nathan and Lola.”

While the characters all “have enough edge, enough complexity, enough true quirk to spring alive from the page,” the novel, Mayer concluded, “is a love letter to the state of Indiana, especially its woods and wilder corners.”

Sum It Up

Pat Summit with Sally Jenkins

(Three Rivers, 407 pp., $16)

Subtitled “1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective,” Summitt’s memoir follows her from her childhood on a Tennessee farm through her time as an Olympic competitor and years as a successful college basketball coach.

As she observes, though, the “numbers that are so often used to describe my career” do not “begin to sum up the years of my life or the events stamped most deeply on me.”

Summitt explains, “Thirty-eight years as the head coach at Tennessee. Eight national championships. An all-time record of 1,098 victories, and a 100 percent graduation rate, which was the real point of all that winning. Twenty-seven successful years of marriage, followed by one shattering breakup. Six crushing miscarriages compensated for by one matchless, peerless son, for which I’m grateful to God. Two devastating and incurable medical diagnoses.”

As she goes on to say, while most memoir writers “rely on others, the people who have known us best, and most intently, to complete the picture of ourselves,” Summitt is “especially reliant” as, at 59, she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Reviewing the book for USA Today, Deirdre Donahue said that “Summitt recalls her life in vivid detail, describing its triumphs, both on and off the court” and “also conveys how it feels to be diagnosed at age 59 with an incurable brain disease.”

As Donahue observed, “The book teaches a master class in managing people,” as “the most fascinating chapters detail Summitt's relationships with her players, all of whom graduated. Each individual and each team presented unique challenges. Some players needed to be reined in, others pumped up.”

Despite the book’s focus on Summitt’s successes, Donahue noted, “There is, however, a gently elegiac undercurrent to ‘Sum It Up.’ ” While Summitt is “trying new therapies, taking medications and exercising,” this “famously fierce competitor doesn't rant and rave about this final battle. Rather, with her trademark honesty and grace, Summitt reveals her fears, her early anger and astonishment, her diminishing abilities, her decision to retire, and how her faith sustains her.”

What the Family Needed

Steven Amsterdam

(Penguin, 262 pp., $16)

Amsterdam follows his debut, “Things We Didn’t See Coming,” with this novel in stories about a family whose members discover individual superpowers in response to personal crisis. A teenage daughter, for example, can make herself invisible as she contends with her parents’ divorce, while her mother discovers that she has somehow developed the endurance to swim epic distances.

In Entertainment Weekly, Karen Valby gave Amsterdam’s book an A, labeling the novel “a wishful fantasy about the strength it can take to love one’s family members well.” As Valby explained, “Somehow the novel feels at once magical and very normal.”

Writing for the online literary magazine The Rumpus, Greg Hunter said, “Amsterdam grounds ‘What the Family Needed’ in the tension and tedium of domestic life, then lets readers tread around while the fantastic cracks the story wide open.”

Publishers Weekly found that one of the book’s “delights is piecing together the truth about each character as his or her inner world and the family’s perception intersect.” The magazine’s reviewer also pointed to Amsterdam’s prose, noting, “There are moments when the writing’s simplicity becomes its own kind of superpower.”

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